1.58-million-staff Amazon will soon have more Nvidia GPUs than employees, AWS to buy more than 3 million additional chips before 2029 in addition to thousands of existing H100, H200

(Image credit: Shutterstock / nikkimeel) AWS deal with Nvidia adds 2 million Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and Rubin Ultra GPUs, on top of more than 1 million committed in March 2026Totals more than 3 million Nvidia GPUs due before 2029, a ~1.9x multiple for each of Amazon's roughly 1.58 million employeesNvidia's CFO has said deliveries start this quarter, not in 2027, but neither company says what it counts as a GPU or what the deal costsAmazon ended 2025 with about 1.58 million full- and part-time employees, most in fulfillment centers and delivery operations, with a much smaller share working in its AWS data center division (estimated at around 246,000).By mid-2028, Amazon Web Services expects to have taken delivery of roughly twice that many new Nvidia GPUs, based on a recent deal it made with Nvidia.The latest deal was announced on August 26, the same afternoon Nvidia reported quarterly earnings, and will see AWS plan to deploy two million additional Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and Rubin Ultra GPUs across its global infrastructure in 2027 and 2028. This is on top of over a million Nvidia GPUs that AWS committed to at Nvidia GTC 2026 in March, and which Nvidia's Ian Buck told Reuters would ship from 2026 through 2027.A mammoth deal that dwarf's Amazon's entire payrollTogether, this all amounts to over three million GPUs in play between the data center giant and the chip designer, which is also the world's most valuable company at the time of writing.

At 3 million GPUs against a workforce of 1.58 million, that's nearly 1.9 Nvidia GPUs per employee.This is only Amazon's commitment to Nvidia; it also has its own custom Tranium3 GPUs, which the company says are "nearly fully subscribed" or "almost fully booked" as of mid-2026.At the same time, Amazon is not increasing job roles on its end; it cut around 30,000 corporate roles between October 2025 and January 2026, a restructuring its top HR executive, Beth Galetti, described as "reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy."Building on an already solid baseWhile AWS's current GPU base from Nvidia, consisting mainly of H100 and H200 GPUs, is smaller than Microsoft's 485,000 count, it is hardly a rounding error, with Omdia estimating that Amazon bought 196,000 Hopper GPUs in 2024 alone.Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!The interesting part is determining what counts as a GPU: Nvidia and Amazon's joint statement about 2 million GPUs across calendar years 2027 and 2028 might mean two very different things depending on how you count GPUs.At GTC 2025, Nvidia said it would count Rubin-generation GPUs by compute die rather than by package, which is why the Vera Rubin rack was first unveiled as NVL144. It reversed course before CES 2026, and the flagship now ships as Vera Rubin NVL72, counting 72 two-die packages.

First reported by TechRadar.